A blog on the current crises in the Middle East and news accounts unpublished by the US press. Daily timeline of events in Iraq as collected from stories and dispatches in the French and Italian media: Le Monde (Paris), Il Corriere della Sera (Milan), La Repubblica (Rome), L'Orient-Le Jour (Beirut) and occasionally from El Mundo (Madrid).

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Israel Trains Kurds

Just what we need. Another secret military installation.

The Israeli newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, reports that dozens of Israeli military instructors have been dispatched into northern Iraq by Israeli security contractors and are training Kurdish fighters at a secret base. Meanwhile, Israeli construction companies are engaged in building an airport in Irbil, Hawler International Airport. The companies are (were) working in utmost secrecy.

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Seymour HershNew Yorker Sept 2004Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel’s view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. Israel feels particularly threatened by Iran, whose position in the region has been strengthened by the war. The Israeli operatives include members of the Mossad, Israel’s clandestine foreign-intelligence service, who work undercover in Kurdistan as businessmen and, in some cases, do not carry Israeli passports.

"Israeli SF and intelligence units have been operating in Kurdistan since the end of the Gulf War."

Israeli forces have really been operating in Kurdistan since shortly after the Six Day War. Israel, to its credit (in my view, at least) supported the Kurdish uprisings in the 70s and I have heard, reliably, that some of its soldiers even engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Iraqi army in Kurdistan at the time. This may not have been official policy either, but for all the acts that Israel could genuinely be ashamed of, support for the Kurds is not one of them.

Well everyone, except the Turks, have supported the Kurds at one time or another--Iran, Syria, the US, the USSR and even Saddam himself when he signed a deal with PUK against KDP.

The Kurds have declared de facto independence, selling off oil contracts and hiring the arch-enemy of the Arab states and Iran for secret training and airport construction. Couldn't they have hired the Chinese or the Brazilians? They are stoking the fires by dealing with the devil because sooner or later they will have to confront Sunni and Shi'a Arabs from a position of weakness.